Although the city’s stockyards closed two years ago, the odor continues from a handful of remaining businesses in BridgePoint industrial park — and it’s keeping people away, city officials say.

“You just can’t show anyone the land on a hot, windy day in August,” Baumann said. “It’s not good.”

As a way to get the stink out, South St. Paul officials are considering an ordinance that would require businesses to eliminate odor pollution or face a possible penalty. Smells would be measured by “odor units” that city staff would measure through a hand-held olfactory gadget such as a Nasal Ranger or Scentometer.

Businesses that contribute to the stench in the industrial park include an animal byproduct rendering plant, a tanning company and a couple of small slaughterhouses, officials said.

“These are all great companies that have been there many years, but — and I’m trying to be nice here — they sometimes stink,” Baumann said.

City planner Peter Hellegers said the city first wants to talk to the businesses that would most likely be affected by the ordinance before bringing a draft in for public hearings and readings.

He said the city code currently has a subsection that relates to odors, but it references odors that are “reasonably objectionable” and doesn’t have measureable data. It’s “so subjective” and rarely used, he said.

The ordinance would be the first of its kind in Minnesota, said Charles McGinley, technical director for St. Croix Sensory, a Lake Elmo business that makes the Nasal Ranger and specializes in rating stench.

Hennepin County regularly monitors the air outside its garbage incinerator near Target Field in Minneapolis using olfactory devices, McGinley said.

Hellegers said South St. Paul most likely would adopt what’s called the FIDO system, an acronym for Frequency, Intensity, Duration and Offensiveness.

Under the system, which was developed by the Texas Commission of Environmental Quality in 2007, odors are classified as highly offensive, offensive, unpleasant or not pleasant. Hide processing and sewage-treatment sludge, for instance, are listed as highly offensive odors, while garbage is under the offensive category and asphalt and chlorine are considered unpleasant.

Monitoring would not be random, but rather done by trained city staff after a complaint about a business is reported, Hellegers said.

“I can’t imagine we’d be going out looking for bad smells,” he said.

The type of odor and its duration would be taken into account, Hellegers said. Two air samples taken by an olfactometer would be done no less than 15 minutes apart within a one-hour period.

The city has not yet set an allowable “odor unit” an olfactory device would measure, but it would be standard for all businesses. The city could begin sampling to set guidelines as early as this summer, Hellegers said.

Guilty parties would first be notified through mail to correct the odor pollution within 60 days. The city could then abate the pollution as a public nuisance at the business owner’s expense or issue an administrative citation.

“It would be no different than how we handle someone who, say, doesn’t cut their grass,” Hellegers said.

Steve Haider acknowledges his company smells.

Haider is a procurement manager at Sanimax, a rendering plant in the business park, which processes more than 8 million pounds of meat byproducts a week into animal feed or biofuels.

He said the company is considering increasing the height of its air stacks to control the odor leaving the building. It has installed several more “air scrubbers” in the plant in recent years.

“It’s really expensive to do,” he said.

On Thursday, Haider was among a dozen business people likely to be affected by the ordinance who attended a town hall meeting organized by the River Heights Chamber of Commerce at Waterous Co.

He said it’s too early to formulate an opinion on the proposed ordinance.

“It comes down to if it’s going to be reasonable,” Haider said. “But it has the possibility to be a good thing.”

Don Feste, a safety and facility manager at Waterous, said the smell in the business park has “greatly improved … and it’s not even close” to the stockyards’ smells.

Now, he said, he catches an occasional whiff from Twin City Bagels, which makes more than a million bagels a day in the former yards.

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